Introduction : TOP SEO-Secrets

Introduction: Why Use Search Engine Optimization?

If you are newer to the concept of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) you might be wondering what all the fuss is about. However if you have been running a website for a while you have probably noticed the necessity for this practice which is essentially the fine art of making your website easier to find for people searching it using “niche language.”

Niche language simply means using terms and phrases in your website or blog copy that are most commonly used by people when they type what they are looking for into a search engine. These phrases are also noted and collected by the search engine bots and spiders that belong to the search engines. The more friendly the copy in your web site is to the search engine spiders, the more likely people are to find you (which of course increases your sales.) In addition, the more hits you get from people searching for your products or services the higher your web site will be indexed on the search engine pages.

Remember how web pages work! It is basically one big popularity contest. Essentially the more hits you have, the higher your ranking is in the search engines. This leads to more business and more hits and a website that is the equivalent of a wealthy rising cyber star!

To use a metaphor – let’s say that the launching of your web site is like a launch party. Launching a website without any type of SEO is like throwing a party and forgetting to invite people.

Or you can also compare it to a party where the invitations are sent out in a language that is not recognized by the guests.

Launching your website should be an exciting event. The reasons events (and the launches of new web sites) often fail is because:

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You fail to list your website’s URL properly in search engines or when you completely ignore the section in URL submission sites that ask you to fill out keywords.

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Your customers can’t find the party. This can happen when you decide to go the cheap route and opt for a free hosted domain instead of your own domain name. This is a case where customers can’t find your address. A good example is the person who opts for a split domain, which very often leads a visitor to your host’s site and not to your’s. The free bravenet.com and freeserver.com sites are notorious examples of free websites that offer split domain names for nothing.

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They have found your website address but are greeted with 404 message that that informs you that a site has mysteriously disappeared or been removed. This can also happen because you opted for a free domain name or a host with limited bandwidth.

In a nutshell, Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your web site as identifiable as possible to both people and search engines. If this sounds like it might be difficult and schizophrenic thing to accomplish it is.

This is because having a people-friendly web site is not the same as having a search engine friendly web site. A search engine friendly web site is one that appeals to tiny robots called “spiders” that search the World Wide Web for your site every time some one types in a search for information. The idea is to have copy on your website that is a combination of both.

The intention of SEO copywriting is to elevate your site’s ranking in the search engines by including what are called targeted keywords and keyword descriptions right in the body of the text. These keywords are obtained by finding out how people phrase their requests when they input a request into the search engines.

Most people obtain their keywords by doing a bit of market research. The keyword content is located by using a keyword search tool such as the Overture keyword search tool. Once the top ten to twenty most-searched-for keywords are found, articles are then created around each of these key phrases and posted to the web site. Each of these new search engine optimized articles creates new pages or the search engines to spider when people type in those key phrases during a search. So in essence the search engine optimized article is mainly a way to increase sales or membership conversions by increasing your visibility in the search engines.

Being savvy about SEO is not rocket science. However it does means knowing a bit about html and keyword optimization. It entails knowing how to phrase things so that computers understand the language of what it is you are trying to convey or sell when you submit your site to the search engines.

Practicing effective SEO techniques can involve using simple market research skills but it is not as technical as it sounds. Some of the best marketers in fact would say that to some extent it also involves using your intuition to second-guess what your customers might be looking for every time they use a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for a product.

In this e-book we are going to take you through the basics of how to create a search engine friendly site including how to create a search engine friendly web-page, (or blog page) how to submit your URL to the search engines and how to optimize your site using search engine friendly content.

The reason it is so important for you to know how to talk to robots is because it is an aspect of web site and e commerce marketing that is vital to the branding and marketing of your product or service. By doing just a few simple things, you can give your web site an edge over the competition’s by making your business recognizable to both spiders and potential visitors alike.

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SOURCE : Introduction : TOP SEO-Secrets

TOP SEO-Secrets Part I : Creating A Search Engine Friendly Web Page

1. The Importance of a Great Host

Your first step to preparing yourself for search engine optimization is to make sure that you have a web site that works. Having a site that functions is more than half the battle when it comes to advertising and promoting your site.

The reason that it is absolutely of the essence that you have a website that works seamlessly from the home page to the check out page is because just one broken link or one arrival to a 404 page makes all of the hard work that you will do optimizing your site useless. For instance if you choose a web host with a small band width you might find your customers unable to access the many SEO articles that you have attached to your site or visual components of your site suddenly becoming invisible because your site can’t support html tags without aborting memory.

Another reason that your choice of web site host is crucial is because a site that is down is neither robot or search engine friendly. You are basically spending a lot of effort doing SEO to advertise what half the time would be the non-virtual equivalent of a blank piece of paper.

This is why it is absolutely paramount to find a web host that keeps its promise to keep your site running 24 hours a day; seven days a week. This means that you need to stay away from websites with limited bandwidth and lots of downtime. This means staying away from “free hosting.”

The same goes for blogging. If you are choosing a blogging site, don’t choose a free one. Choose one that allows you to buy your own blogging name for it and that can guarantee you some bandwidth.

Free hosting is a good solution for a diarist or hobbyist. They are the ideal solution for the person who wants to show pictures of their new baby or display the big fish they caught while on vacation. However they don’t convey “professional” to either a search engine or people searching for a site.

It is easy to see why free servers have tempted so many people. Many people have enrolled in free hosting only to find that when it comes time to optimize their site that visitors are not directed to their page but rather to a page that advertises the host’s web hosting services.

Even if you are willing to pay for your website you have to be careful. The problem is that any Tom, Dick or Harry can host your site on a server.

So practice the principle of Buyer Beware. Make sure your web site host promises you the stability you need to advertise your services properly otherwise the search engines may be led to believe that your site is never up and your customers may be lead to a disappointing first experience with your web page that makes you appear as if you are out of business.

2. How Free Hosting Can Cost You

The host you choose should provide your business with a strong foundation on which can you build on in the future.

In essence there are two kinds of hosting:

˜ Shared hosting. This means that your web site will be sharing space with a number of other sites. The host manages the service, but it is your responsibility to maintain your site. The major problem with this scenario is that if one of the other people sharing the site experiences heavy traffic your site could go down as your host tries to accommodate the heavy load of visitors.

˜ Dedicated hosting. In this scenario you lease a server from a host. You’ll pay more, but because you’re not sharing, traffic with other web masters you don’t have to be concerned about your site suddenly appearing to degrading or disappearing. This option is sometimes divided into unmanaged hosting, which provides limited support for lower fees, and managed hosting, which costs more but provides higher-level support, maintenance, security, and services.

Free web hosting has some MAJOR disadvantages, especially when it comes to search engine optimization that I should mention here.

Robots and Spiders Hate Pop Up Advertising

One of the main reasons to stay away from free web hosts is that search engine spiders and robots hate the pop up advertising that free web hosts always use to subsidize the cost of allowing you to use their space. Many search engines and spiders won’t read these pages for content at all, especially if they contain a lot of pop up banners or images which are merely read by the bots as blank space.

Some hosts require you to place a banner on your pages; others display a window that pops up every time a page on your site loads, while still others impose an advertising frame on your site. It is also typical for the web host to add an increasing amount of pop up sites and web banners to your page to get you so annoyed that you finally spring to pay for a “real” URL. It is also not unusual for your web site to contain big pieces of copy that have been cut off by the site’s bandwidth using up all of your available memory to support a banner or a pop up frames. Why bother writing SEO copy if it is going to keep disappearing from your site.

The presence of pop up frames also cause big problems when it come are not recommended as they may cause problems when you submit your web site to search engines. Google, Overture and Yahoo search engine spiders, crawlers and bots may not even bother to crawl a site with pop up frames.

Usually they will simply ignore your site rather than list it in their directories.

Also if you are planning to exchange links with another site or become part of a multilevel program such as Clickbank, you may not be allowed to join. This is because a pop up or pop under often prevents a person from backspacing to a previous page which is crucial for acceptance into a program like Clickbank. .

You Can’t List A Split Domain Names

Web sites that offer free hosting usually offer you what is called a split domain name. In fact some web hosting sites will still stick you with a split domain name even after you have paid for hosting so be careful.

It is absolutely essential that you have your own domain name or very little of your SEO (keywords and keyword phrases) will be picked up by the search engines.

What’s the difference between an owned and split domain name. An example of an owned domain name would www.healthywealthyandwise.com. If you choose a free hosting service your domain might change to look something like -www.freesitehosting.com/healthywealthyandwise.

When people search for your site they will probably be led to a page that advertises freesitehosting.com (a fictional company) rather than your site. Then they will have to search for your site within the free server. You can lose a lot of potential business after they give up trying to enter your business name into yet another search engine in another useless attempt to find you.

No Presence in the Search Engines

Another big drawback of the split domain that comes with free web hosting is that most URL submission services simply will not accept it as a URL or only accept it as a short version. This is because when you try to enter a split domain name into a URL submission service anything after a slash tends to be cut off.

So let’ say for example that you decide to enter www.freesitehosting.com /treasure chest into a search engine submission tool. The next thing you know, when your site is listed in the search engines, your full domain name is list, but when you click on it, it leads you to some strange portal or information about how to register a domain name with your host. Even worse it sometimes informs the person searching that your domain name is for sale, which of course makes it look like you have gone completely out of business! More often then not this sad scenario ends up in the total loss of your domain name or a stranger trying to sell it back to you for a pretty penny.

A Shortage of Band Width

All web hosts impose a limit on the amount of traffic your web site can receive per day and per month. This means that if your site attracts visitors beyond a quota that is based on what you are allowed in terms of traffic during certain time period, the web host will disable your web site (or perhaps sends you a bill for the hosting of the excess traffic). Of course if your website is free or very cheap there is even more chance of your website shorting out when it comes to bandwidth.

It is hard to recommend that a specific minimum amount of bandwidth, since it depends on how you design your site, your target audience, and the number of visitors you expect to attract to your site. In general, 100MB traffic per month is too little for anything other than your personal home page yet that is exactly the amount of bandwidth that most free web hosting deals offer.

3. Choosing an SEO Friendly Web Host

As mentioned before, the more stable your site is the easier it is to be search engine optimize your Internet business. Here are some things to look for when choosing a web site hose.

Minimum Uptime

Your website’s minimum uptime is something that will determine whether or not people will 1) be able to access your site quickly 2) be able to access it whenever they want. The percentage figure that the web host claims describes as minimum uptime must be high or your web site will be slow and unreliable.

You can find this percentage somewhere in the web host’s lists of statistics or features. This figure describes the percentage of time that your web site will actually be ONLINE. This figure should 99.5% or higher!

If they don’t provide this kind of information upfront or seem to be burying it, then it is an indication that the site might suffer from a lot of downtime. This not only costs you time and customers, but also such a site is not even worth the time spent on search engine optimization.

Plenty of Bandwidth

Bandwidth (sometimes loosely referred to as “traffic”) is the amount of bytes that are transferred from your site to visitors when they browse your site per day.

The first thing that you need to know is that there is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Don’t believe any commercial web host that advertises itself as offering “unlimited bandwidth”. The host has to pay for the use of the bandwidth, and if you consume a lot of it, most will simply just charge you for the extra amount that you use. Many startup sites that require high bandwidth have found this out the hard way when they suddenly receive a lot of hits and end up with deductions on their credit.

The reason this is important is because your web site can actually start to cost you if your search engine optimization techniques are working and you receive a lot of hits. The idea is to find a website that will not charge you outrageous usage fees if you do end up using more bandwidth then they initially thought. As most websites fail as moneymakers most web hosts are not counting on you becoming so successful that you hog their entire cyberspace. However if you do, watch out as exorbitant fees are often hidden in the fine print of the contracts that they have with you.

To give you a rough idea of the typical traffic requirements of a website, most new sites that are not software archives use less than 3GB of bandwidth per month. If you plan to use more space, then buy more space.

If you are performing SEO techniques on your website it is almost guaranteed that your traffic requirements will grow over time. This is a natural side effect of your site becoming better known. CHECK THE FINE PRINT of the web hosts Term of Agreement policy to see if they will charge you any extra if your site uses too much bandwidth.

Subdomains

The best free hosting services do not charge you extra for adding anywhere from ten to twenty subdomains. For those of you not familiar with subdomains, it allows you to customize a page and give it a different URL. This can be useful when it comes to adding search engine optimized content to your site.

For instance, let’s just say that you are the owner of www.fishinglureearrings.com. However an individual from another site has sent you an excellent article about earrings made from feathers that is brilliantly optimized with searchable keywords and you want to post it on your web site so that it can draw more traffic to your site. In this case you would want to create a page called www.fishinglureearings/feathers.com so that the search engines easily find the niche material.

Customizing an entire page like this is a good way to keep your web site fresh and lively for your readers. When the search engines see fresh material like this they are also more encouraged to crawl the page and index it on their search engine pages. This of course improves your overall search engine ranking as well as the number of potential buying customers to your website.

4. What’s In a Domain Name?

There are a number of really good reasons as to WHY you should own your own domain name:

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If you ever change your web host, your domain name goes with you. Your regular visitors or customers who knew your site name as www.fishinglureearrings.com (for example) would not have to be informed about a change of URL to www.fishinglurejewelry.com. They would simply type your domain name and be redirected to your new site location on the web This is important because the last thing you want to do is redo all of your search engine optimization all over again if you ever have to move your site! Also don’t think that having to move your site won’t one day happen to you. Quite often owners of a new website don’t ever plan on it becoming successful and having to forgo small bandwidth for a larger option.

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If you are a business, a domain name gives you credibility. It is part of your identity and your branding Few people would be willing to do business with a company with a dubious URL like http://www.reallycheaphosting.com/feathers-earringlure /108985/htm. It is simply too long and complicated. A page URL like this is also too long for the search engine submission services that might truncate the end of it to make it fit. This will lead visitors to your site to reallycheaphosting.com (a fictional company) or a 404 page of some kind.

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If you get a domain name that describes your company’s business or name, people can remember the name easily and can return to your site without having to look it up or search all over the Internet. In fact, if you get a good name that describe your product or service, you might even get people who were trying their luck by typing your product” in their browser. A good example would be a site called “vacuums.com” Of course that name is probably taken which is where cleverness either to do with rhyme or being really specific about your niche might come in handy.

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If you want to attract sponsor, link partners or advertisers for your web site, owning your own domain name gives your web site credibility and respectability. The fact that you have paid for your domain name lets them (and the search engines) know that you are serious. The reason you need all of this credibility is because the search engines are more likely to place sites that have a lot of links in them higher on their search engine pages then ones that are only indexed with just a couple of sites.

If it’s possible it’s a great idea to make your domain name identical to your web site name. If you have ever tried to do this, you probably know by now that just about every phrase and product name in the world is already registered as a domain name. Still, at the very try to register a domain that at least closely mimics the web site you are creating.

For instance, lets just say you want to open an online gem jewelry store and call it gemjewelry.com. Alas, you will see that domain is taken and some one else on a site called whosit.com is offering it for sale for one thousand dollars. Whosit.com is a search engine that allows you to find out who owns what domain name and how much they want to charge you to own it. However you do see that the gemjewelry.net is available to buy for $10 so you purchase that and newagebooks.net becomes the name of your site.

Naming a site after its domain name is important because it is part of what marketers call branding. If your web site name is also part of your URL, your customers will automatically know where to go and what to type into a search engine to find you.

Still it might be better to have a .com name that is available such as symbolicgems.com then gemjewelry.net. This is because if a customer types an important key word phrase such as “gem jewelry” into a Google search box chances are that they will end up at the web site that has the .com on its tail. Also research shows that people tend to remember a .com name more then they would ever remember a .net name (or any of the other popular URL suffixes such as .net, .info or .biz.)

In the competitive world of the Internet, where people automatically turn to the Web for information, it pays to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. However you might have to be prepared to pay for exactly the right domain name so that your business is easy for your customers to find. Recall that the number of times your link is clicked on because your URL name is a good match for your product, the faster and higher your domain name will rise in the search engine page rankings.

Of course if you are starting your business on a shoestring you might find yourself doing this entire web site name process backwards. It can be cheaper to obtain a domain first and then name your web site or business after the domain name that you managed to acquire. For instance, if all the good .com names were already taken for a site you wanted to name healthyshoes.com and all that you could get is healthyshoes.net then you might want to consider naming your entire business HealthyShoes.Net.

The reason people do this is exactly because they couldn’t get that perfect domain name. However there is no business name that is more perfectly optimized then one that is named exactly as the URL displays itself on the screen, as would be the case with HealthyShoes.Net. This is much better then naming it something more vague such as PhysicallyCorrectShoes.Com. However sometimes a memorable name that does not have it’s .com taken is less then one creative degree away from the name that you originally wanted for your site.

For instance in the case of the unavailable healthyshoes.net, a quick search with keyword inventory tools might reveal that people don’t type in the term “healthy shoes” at all when they search for this type of product. In fact it seems that they are more likely to search for healthy shoes for feet or health shoes in which case both terms make very decent .com names – healthyshoesforfeet.com and healthshoes.com. In theory healthshoes.com would have a slight edge over the keyword healthyshoesforfeet.com as it is shorter and more easily picked up by the search engines. It is also quite easy to name a business Healthy Shoes For Feet or Health Shoes without compromising what your business is about.

Domain names can be of any length up to 67 characters. You don’t have to settle for an obscure acronym for a domain name like psychicchat.info when what you mean is spiritualrsingleschatroom.com.

The jury is still out on whether a long or short domain name is better. Some marketing experts argue that shorter domain names are easier to remember, easier to type and have less spelling errors: for example, “bewitched.com” is easier to remember and less prone to typos than “samanthastevens.com” (which can also be spelled stephens)

Whether long or short it is of course always a good idea to relate the domain name to a keyword that is relevant to the service you provide. This means doing a bit of keyword research on the kind of lingo or slang that your potential customers might use. For instance if you are planning to do a website about Yorkshire Terriers you might do better with yorkies.com (yorkies being a common search term) rather than yorkshireterriers.com (as it is longer and terriers is a commonly misspelled word.)

Some experts say that a longer domain name is usually easier on the human memory - for example, “grn.com” is a sequence of unrelated letters that is difficult to remember and type correctly, whereas if we expand it to its long form “getrichnow. com”, clients are more likely to remember the domain name.

However if you get an acronym that makes sense by creating another phrase or word you have probably hit SEO gold. A good example of a clever acronym is www.madd.com (Mothers Against Drunk Driving).

As a rule of thumb – if it is a shorter name make sure it is to the point and meaningful. If it is longer than two words then make sure it is a memorable phrase and preferably a combination of keywords created from terms that people look for when they search for your type of service or product online.

Subtly Altering A Domain Name

Very often, if you can’t get the domain name you want, the domain name registrar will suggest alternate for you to choose from. For example, if you wanted toytrain.com, and it was taken (and of course it is), the domain registrar will suggest other options such as:

thetoytrain.com

mytoytrain.com

toytrain.com

If do decide you take the “the…” and “my…” forms of the domain name, you must always remember to promote your site with the full form of the name as this is another good way for you to accidentally drive traffic to the lucky owner of plain old toytrain.com.

Paying Attention To Suffixes

If you are a niche marketer having a suffix that is not a .com may not hurt your business. If you can’t get the “.com” domain of their choice, but find the “.net”, “.org” or other country-specific top level domains (TLDs) available (like .de,, .ca, .nu, .uk) it might be a good idea to go for it if your business is specialized.

For instance if you are a local historian who is based in Toronto Canada and specializes in the history of the city, it is not a bad idea to use the domain associated with that city if it is available. Example: Torontohistory.ca. This, believe it or not, is a better choice then Torontohistory.com which is less specialized and specific.

Your URL suffix can also accent a not for profit or informational organization. For some the .org suffix describes a non-profit venture and the .info suffix describes a site that is more like a library or instructional. Of course the shortage of available and affordable .com suffixes means that many businesses are also using these suffixes. For instance a site named petdogs.info is not necessarily a free informational resource.

Others would say to not compromise when it comes to the “. com” issue. As grounds for their arguments, they cite that some browsers, such as Overture, work alphabetically. Apparently, the browser searches for a domain name “aaaapplepicking.com” before attempting “aaaapplepicking.net”, As such, people who do that will be delivered to your competitor’s site if you do not also own the “.com” extension which of course comes alphabetically before the .net extension.

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SOURCE : TOP SEO-Secrets Part I : Creating A Search Engine Friendly Web Page

TOP SEO-Secrets Part I-2 : Creating A Search Engine Friendly Web Page

5. How to Register a Domain Name

Almost everywhere there is web hosting there is a domain name registration system. They give you permission to use the name you want by submitting for approval to an organization called organization called InterNIC.

For example, if you choose a name like madmoney.com”, you will have to go to a registrar and pay a registration fee. Usually the fee ranges between $15 to $35 for that name. That will give you the right to the name for a year, and you will have to renew it annually for (usually) the same amount per annum.

Some commercial web hosts will register it and pay for the domain name for free (usually only the commercial web hosts), as long as you agree to sign up for a minimum of few years of web hosting.

Step-By-Step Instructions

If you want to register a domain name, here’s what you need to do.

First of all try to think of a few good domain names that you’d like to use before you go to the site. It is inevitable that the one name that you already want is already taken so try to come up with a few variations on your theme. For instance if you are after the web site www.greatlegs.com also consider options such as greatlegs.com, nicelegs.com, legsaregreat.com, nicegams.com and whatever else you can think of that might get you a good .com name.

Get your credit card or Paypal al account ready to pay a maximum of $50 or so for a domain name. This is a requirement of most if not all registrars. It will allow you to claim and get the domain name immediately on application.

If you have not yet decided on a web host but want to hurry up and register your domain name before somebody else does, you can always register the domain name separately and then decide on the right SEO friendly web host later. This way you can quickly secure your domain name before it’s too late and still take your time to set up the other aspects of your site.

6. How To Create SEO Titles

Writing Titles is an art but it is even more of a craft when it comes to incorporating search engine optimization into the mix.

The first thing that you need to know is that writing titles for selling what’s on your web pages is very different then writing material for print or radio based magazines. Titles for web pages are accessed by search engines and unlike a phonebook are not listed by alphabetical order.

Also unlike ordinary advertising, a catchy title or catch phrase may not be as effective as a more boring or to-the-point phrase. For instance, David Letterman’s late night talk show is produced by a company called World Wide Pants (an obvious on purpose joke that leads the reader away the idea it is a comedy show.) However the same ironic title would be an absolute disaster on the Internet. Many individuals searching for pants would end up with a link to Letterman’s show and many people looking for pants would end up with sites having to do with comedy.

As a beginning web author you need to realize that you will be dealing with two types of titles:

1. The In Context Title. This is the title that sits at the top of your web page that needs to be both people and robot friendly.

2. The Out of Context Title This is the title that is displayed by search engines or in archival pages after a search. It usually appears onscreen as a fragment and as part as a long sorted list. If you can’t come up with a robot-friendly Out of Context title for your web pages many search engines will simply display your title as “Home Page” or “New Page 1″. You could also end up with a nonsensical fragment from somewhere on your site – a phrase from a banner or your site’s design template. This does not exactly lure people to your site!

The In Context Title is the title that is featured on your ACTUAL home page. Lets just say you have the title “The World’s Saddest Music” home page. This page displays your logo, a picture and a description of your product that actually relates to your URL. The purpose of your site is obvious to the reader. You sell sad music.

The out of context title is the one that you will submit to the search engines and it is a title that you are often asked for when you submit your sites to the search engines manually.

However when you write an out-of-context title you need to keep in mind that is for the benefit of the search engine robots that spider the Internet whenever anyone searches for the term “sad music.” You can’t rely on graphics or anything else to entice search engine robots to your site. All they are going to see is a phrase that has to concisely and distinctively express the essence of your product in just a few words. Unlike the in-context title, the out-of-context title has to carry the full weight of describing the page’s contents.

The World’s Saddest Music may not cut it as an out of context title as people do not tend to search the word World or Saddest when looking for diamonds. A good out of context title for such as site would “Sad Music For Broken Hearts” as they are more likely to search with such terms as “heal broken heart” or “sad music” when they are trying to find you!

7. Writing SEO Blurbs

Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to read a long rambling essay on the Internet? It’s hard on the eyes and it doesn’t usually engage the reader. If you want to be a successful SEO copywriter then it is a really good idea to master writing in a short but sweet style.

If you own a website you probably have realized by now that through the entire process of search engine submission to writing descriptions of your products and services you will always be writing in a shorter form known as the blurb.

The blurb crams as much information as possible into the smallest amount of space possible. Whenever you have a chance to write a blurb, especially if it is an out-of-contest piece of description or promotion for your website you should always make sure that it is nicely optimized with keywords in mind.

As mentioned before there are also two kinds of blurbs: the in-context blurb that is found on a page in your site and the out of context blurb that is submitted to search engines.

An in context blurb that is written on a web page is ideally about 600 words long, never shorter than 250 words and never longer than about 900.

An out of context blurb is about 250 words long and appears as a short description of what your site is about on a search engine. It functions as a short but concise summary of the entire contents of your web document.

However the trend lately is for even shorter blurbs, especially when it comes to submitting your site to search engines. Some descriptive blurbs for you site can be as short as 160 characters!

Both your in-context and out-of-context blurbs should be loaded with keywords (you can find a list of search engine optimization tools in the third section of this book.) Super-charging ALL of your content with keywords is essentially what search engine optimized content is!

8. Writing Search Engine Optimized Content

The most effective search engine content is content that is created using keywords or key phrases. These words and phrases are the terms that are most commonly entered into search engines when consumers perform a search on your product or service. You want to write ALL of your content, including titles, the body of your web pages and all out of context material using the most popular key words so that your customers can easily find your business on the Internet.

Unfortunately a lot of SEO copywriting is not very easy for people to read. That is because most people think that the key word has to be repeated ad nauseum in order for it to rise to the top of the search engines. The repetition of a keyword phrase can give your search engine rankings a big boost but reading twisted copy that is ridden with repetitive phrases and words can make a visitor to your site perceive you as a moron who knows nothing about grammar or spelling.

Remember that the goal of effective SEO writing is to not only to improve your searchability and search engine rankings but also to read the copy so they can be lead to the goods or services that you have to sell on your web site. The last thing you want your carefully crafted SEO paragraph to do is lead the visitor’s mouse to click on that X that closes your web page. However this is precisely what happens when people find a badly written SEO paragraph that is a tad too heavy with the keywords. To put it bluntly, if you have too much SEO on your site, a hard sell is a turn off because it makes you look desperate for business. The key is to find that balance between writing for people and writing for the search engines.

Writing online copyist a challenge for many people who try it for the first time simply because they are better at marketing then they are at being a writer! It is very common to experience frustration if you are new at writing SEO copy. Even seasoned, experienced writers who have been at it for years find it difficult especially when the copy must meet a number of length, SEO and content perimeters.

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SOURCE : TOP SEO-Secrets Part I-2 : Creating A Search Engine Friendly Web Page

TOP SEO-Secrets Part II : Creating Web Presence Using SEO

1. Writing Effective SEO Copy

The purpose of SEO copywriting is to elevate your site’s ranking in the search engines by incorporating targeted keywords and keyword descriptions that are found right in your text. Where do keywords come from? No specific place. They are basically obtained by finding out how people phrase their requests when they input a request into the search engines. You find these keywords by using the content keyword search tools provided by Overture or Google (more about this later on in this section!)

Once the top ten to twenty keywords are found, articles are then created around each of these key phrases and posted to the web site. This means being very clever about your sentence construction. Keep in mind it is not just the search engine spiders you are trying to please. These should also make sense and appeal to your reader.

Each search engine optimized articles that you post to your websites gives the search engines something to crawl when people type in those key phrases during a search. So in essence the search engine optimized article is mainly a way to increase sales or membership conversions by increasing your visibility in the search engines. In fact you could say that writing keyword paragraphs is one of the most effective ways to increase your web presence.

The most effective SEO writing is SEO writing that is brief. Professional SEO copywriters that keyword paragraphs ideally be about 250 -500 words in length. These types of articles must be well written and informative with at least two of the search terms strategically placed within the text and other on-page elements. Ideally however they should be longer than 100 words.

The key is to find a happy balance between copywriting for people and copywriting for the search engines. Here are some tips to writing more effective SEO copy.

First of all don’t overdo the keywords. You will look incompetent to both the readers and the search engine spiders! Have you ever landed on a page that has been over optimized. Not only does the article usually just seem to “fill space” and not provide any information but it also makes whoever is behind its writing look greedy! To preserve your reputation on the web it is probably a good idea to only employ about three different keywords or keyword phrases per page. You want them to click the link to your site, as opposed to close their browser window in frustration once they read your awkward, badly composed keyword optimized copy!

Don’t write too little! There is such a thing as being too concise when it comes to SEO. People become very disappointed and annoyed when they search for some time for a focused subject only to be led to the same vague definition over and over. Disappointing and irritating people with your shallow search engine copy is no way to get customers or membership conversions.

Be tasteful about the use your keywords. Your keywords should not dominate or overload the piece. One way to tell if your piece makes sense is to read it out loud. If it sounds robotic, repetitive or nonsensical then you have probably laid on the keywords a little too thick.

Write the way you talk. Get to the point as if you were having a conversation and incorporate the keywords into your text afterwards. Excellent search engine optimized copy never sounds like the sentence was deliberately contrived to accommodate the keyword.

Don’t use big words. Try to write in grade four to grade six level conversational language. If you write any loftier you will not be comprehensible to the masses. SEO copy is definitely not the occasion to impress others with your large vocabulary or knowledge of obscure adjective.

Keywords that are too obtrusive or omnipresent are a turn off for everything human that can read. Even if the search engine spiders find them friendly, lousy, forced sounding content is only going to have your visitor clicking the little X at the right hand corner of the browser window after they have decided your writing is incomprehensible.

Use keyword phrases in headlines, titles and sub titles. There is no point to trying to do this if the keyword phrase that you are trying to incorporate completely distorts the title of your article. Never use a keyword in a title if it obscures the article’s topic or intention. Your best bet is to try to keep the title a complete sentence well at the same time trying to capture the general sense of it by using one or two well-chosen, high ranking keywords.

Use keywords in the first sentence, last sentence and at least once in each paragraph. This is a rule that many professional SEO copywriters follow in attempt to make their technical writing sound more like “natural language.” Natural language is a term that SEO copywriters use to describe the process of having to transform spider engine food into something that is understood by humans.

Use keywords as part of bolded, italicized or Bulleted Lists. This type of treatment can help highlight the words or phrases, not only to the reader, but also for the search engine. In terms of people, this type of layout is supposed to perform a bit of subliminal seduction when it comes to them retaining the memory of what your site is supposed to be all about in the first place.

Don’t use too many keywords in one paragraph. Avoid using focused keyword phrases when a more general term is required. Not every generic phrase that you see is an open call to insert a keyword phrase. For example, try to avoid writing “search engine optimized business opportunities” instead of the word “opportunities” if you can help it. Trying to fit several keywords into a sentence structure that only requires one word makes your copy sound stiff and unnatural.

An example of this kind of overkill would be “You can become a free affiliate member by registering for a free affiliate member enrollment at our free affiliate member website page.”

In conclusion the only sure way to test the effectiveness of your copy is by posting it and then searching for it by in an engine such as Google or Overture. If type in the keyword phrase and it turns up on the search engine, then you have done a wonderful job as at SEO copywriter!

Although all of this sounds so easy, it is actually subject to all kinds of inconsistencies and Murphy’s laws. For one thing SEO is not a guarantee of high rankings even if your SEO is done by an expert. If SEO worked in every single case then every single site on the web that has tried to incorporate would be highly ranked. Of course this isn’t true. The problem is that not all search engine spiders search a page in the same way.

It seems that one page of search engine optimized content can do well in one engine but not as well in another. This has lead to the practice of search engine optimizing several identical articles in different ways in order to appeal to all of the different search engines at once.

The keywords that you use for your page title may also determine whether or not a user will want to view your URL. The out of context page title usually has two parts: a keyword or key phrase that is friendly to the search engine and phrases that distinguishes your page from the thousands of listings that use the same title.

Keep in mind that the first part of the title’s intention is to improve your search engine ranking and the second part’s intention is to increase the click through rate of your pages once they rank well on the search engines. This is where knowledge of your target market becomes crucial!

2. How To Choose the Right Keywords

The first key to using keywords is to start thinking in terms of keyword phrases instead of just one single word. The reason for this is because there are just too many people out there doing exactly the same thing you are – going to an keyword generator or inventory search tool and coming up with the top single keywords that you are every month. This keeps you neck and neck with your competition but it does not really give you an edge over them.

Your key to success here is finding the appropriate “niche” key words. You also want to use two or three words strung together, also known as “keyphrases.” Studies have shown that most people type in two or three word combinations when they conduct searches, not single words.

Coming up with a list of the most targeted key phrases for your web site involves a bit of brainstorming and utilizing some free online web tools which are discussed in Part III of this book.

One method is to put yourself in the headspace of your site’s visitors, and write down words and phrases that you think they would use when searching for a site such as yours. For instance let’s say that you were searching for a daily horoscope. Rather than using just “horoscope” as a keyword you might try keyword combinations such as –

Daily horoscope

Today’s horoscope

Todays horoscope

Todays daily horoscope

Astrology prediction

Todays astrology

Horoscope today

Notice that the misspellings such as “todays” as opposed to “today’s can be included in these keywords. Don’t be afraid to include misspellings and misspell a main keyword throughout your SEO article.

You can also use ad” Dictionary and/or a Thesaurus to come up with words that are related to your topic. If you don’t have a hard copy, there are really good online versions located at:

http://thesaurus.reference.com/

http://dictionary.reference.com/

If your imagination fails you, look up your competitors online and see what kind of keywords they are using. It might inspire you to come up with a phrase that tops your competition.

If you’re trying to target a certain geographic location, make sure to include your city and state in your key phrase list. This is especially important right now, as many of the search engines have branched out into offering “local search.”

One of the keys to search engine optimization is determining your keyword density. This refers to the number of searchable keywords and keyword phrases that you have on your web pages. Keywords are vital to achieving a high page ranking and if you hire a professional SEO firm to do it for you, one of the first things they will do is look at your web pages to see if they have a high keyword density. If there aren’t any keywords on your pages to find for the search engines to index, there is literally nothing to find in the search engine results pages (also known as SERPs).

One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they are first starting a small site is to only submit keywords to the search engines. They either forget or just don’t realize that those keywords also have to be placed somewhere in the text of the site or the search engines just won’t have anything to latch onto when someone uses one of your keywords to do a search. For maximum results think of your search engine submitted keywords as the “hooks” and the keywords in your website copy as the “latches.”

Another challenge is determining how many keywords or keyword phrases should appear on your web page. The number of keywords appear on the page, makes a difference to all of the search engine algorithms. They simply pick on the keywords that are the densest your pages. Of course if you choose very general or highly competitive keywords and keyword phrases you just might end up with a lot of untargeted traffic.

How does untargeted traffic end up at your site? Let’s just say you have a site promoting psychic readings. You go to the Overture Inventory Keyword Search Tool and find out that the most commonly searched words for psychic readings are “free psychic chat”, “free online psychic” and “John Edwards”. Even though these keywords have five times the popularity in terms of sheer numbers there are several reasons why you shouldn’t use them.

First of all the single keyword term “psychic” is way too general. This keyword could bring you untargeted traffic as it would includes masses of individuals looking for something besides psychic readings. They could be looking for psychic tests, psychic books and the band “Psychic TV.” They are not necessarily people who are going to buy a psychic reading.

Even though it is tempting to use keywords with high traffic such as “free online psychic” and “free psychic chat” it is best not to do it. Sometimes a search engine penalizes you if they can’t find the free offer on your site (but this is rare.) More than likely you will be spending all of your time with customers looking for a free reading which can be a pain in the ass to deal with if you are trying to sell them a service.

The keywords and keyword phrases that have the most density on your site should be the ones that improve your search engine optimization in terms of bringing you customers who intend to buy.

To make the matter of keyword density even more complex, not all search engines have the same criteria for searching out keywords. Each major search engine uses a different algorithm to calculate the way keywords are found. Some search engines are friendlier to web pages that are dense with keywords and others, like Google consider too many keywords on one page to be a nonsensical page and not worthy of being indexed. Yet another thing to consider is that these algorithms are changing all the time.

Another thing that many newcomers to SEO don’t realize is that any content that you are linked to off the site is in fact considered by most pages to be the total part of your page’s content. This is why it is so important for you to only provide anchor links to content that is truly relevant to your site’s content.

Here are some tips for how you can manually improve the keyword density and placement of key phrases on your page to perform your own search engine optimization.

Try to think like a search engines. Only one or two keywords should have a high density and the rest that you use should be of a much lower density. Some search engine optimization experts recommend only featuring one keyword a page. However some engines like Google don’t like this as it has led to the creation of sites that have thousands of pages (called doorway pages) that boast a keyword phrase and very little information written around it. If you are going to use single keywords or keyword phrases as the focus of an article intended to create a doorway or portal for the search engines try to keep them as informative and as well-written as possible.

Unifying your web site so that just a few keywords or phrases are the theme of several pages that are linked together can also help boost your site search engine page rankings. Several pages that support each other in terms of optimized content is one way to increase the chance of improving the searchability of a keyword or keyword phrase. This is especially true if the keyword that you want to use is one that is competitive but could bring you loads traffic, as would be the case of a keyword like “psychic reading online” but not a more generic keyword such as “psychic.”

Keywords that are not as common in the search engines can be used more often on a web page. You can be more liberal with these less popular key phrases especially if they accurately and precisely describe the nature of your web business or describe one of its features or benefits.

It can’t be stressed enough that choosing unpopular keywords is not a mistake – especially if you are running a niche business. As choosing keywords that are too popular might bring you untargeted, window-shopping traffic and choosing keywords that are not frequently used might bring you an unvisited web site, the best choice of keywords are the ones that you find that have moderate popularity. It is recommended that you place these keywords somewhere on your home page and preferably in the headers, titles and in the first and concluding paragraphs. You should also make sure that these keywords are submitted to the search engines.

Another clever search engine optimization technique is to make your moderately popular keywords into a phrase that is also a link to another page on your website. As many search engines (particularly Google) favor sites with the most links this is one way to increase your site’s web presence. However also make sure that those links lead to relevant content that supports their existence.

In conclusion, the higher the keyword density of your site is, the more chances you have of your site being visible in search engine ranking pages. Web pages that are ranked the highest are the ones with pages that include as as many individual highly targeted “niche” search terms as possible. Keep this principle in mind if you are planning to use keyword density techniques to perform a search engine optimization on your own site.

3. Using Information and Articles to Attract Traffic

Although the SEO articles that you have on your site don’t have to be long, the more of them that you have on your site the better. In fact the more information you have on your site, the more likely your pages are to be crawled by the search engines. This information can take any form. It can be photo captions, other people’s articles, content in blogs and forums and links to other sites.

With regards to your actual content any information that you own can be considered to be assets that can be divided up, repackaged and parceled out to be

•Reprinted as articles with your url attached to drive traffic to your site

•Sent out as monthly newsletters

•Reprinted in non-virtual sources such as local newspapers to drive traffic to your site

•Used as free bonuses, tips or advice

•Used to stack up your archives with valuable information that will keep your visitors returning to your web pages for more

•Used as the basis of a blog.

When it comes to SEO no document that you have the copyright to should go to waste. Material can be rewritten, revised and revamped to create press releases and newsletters.

Once you have written the article you a use it to generate traffic by emailing it to other publishers or webmasters. Of course this only works if your SEO article is so cleverly crafted that you want it filled with real, useful information about your topic. In this way your keyword-optimized article becomes viral in nature. Other people’s web site pages work for you by drawing readers on their websites to your bio and link at the end of the article.

To get your SEO articles posted, type in the topic of your article” into the top engines such as Google or Lycos. This should lead you to hundreds of sites that are about your topic. Perform a sub search using the phrase such as “submit article” and this should lead you to sites that ask contributors to submit articles. For example if you have a site that sells horseshoes type “submit article horses” or “submit article horseshoes” into the Google search engine and see what happens.

Submit your articles along with your URL and byline and watch yourself rapidly turn into a sought over online expert as people then find your SEO content on other people’s sites along with that link that leads them to you! This is a great way to increase your traffic and the repeat visitors should increase your visibility in the search engines.

4. Obtaining Articles From Syndication Sites

If you are completely talent free always acquire expert content from syndication sites. Every day writers for syndication submit thousands of articles for distribution. All the writer wants in return for their “expert” content is a link to their URL.

Here are some of the top sources for finding free, re-printable articles:

•Articles For Reprint: www.l1nk.com/urr/twt.html

•Constant Content: www.constant-content.com

•Go Articles: www.goarticles.com

•Download articles www.downloadarticles.com

You can also find articles that are for free –

•Article City: www.articlecity.com

•Ezine Articles: www.ezinearticles.com

•Article World: www.articleworld.net

•Ideamarketers: www.ideamarketers.com

However sometimes these free articles aren’t what they are cracked up to be. The only good thing about them? Sometimes you can use them as a point of inspiration for writing your own SEO keyword optimized article.

You know the old saying, you get what you pay for in which case you might want to buy content that is written by an expert. This is called premium content. In this case, you will search for the best articles in terms of expert authorship Internet libraries and then write the author for permission to buy web rights for the article.

You can also contact world-renowned experts at local or distant universities to see if you can acquire the rights to papers and studies that may support the arguments as to why one company or an other should sell your product.

The only risky thing about buying expert content? Usually the expert is putting together their own website and will encourage you to contact them so that they can steal ideas from you.

Very often you might find this premium content in a book you have read in which case you will have to contact the author, the author’s agent or the epublisher to buy rights for the material. If the author is famous it is a real plus because his name will rank higher in the search engines and so will your site!

5. Hiring A Ghost Writer

Fortunately as this industry grows, there are more and more expert ghostwriters out there who also know how to technically craft an SEO paragraph or article so it is at exactly the density that you prefer.

This is a good idea for those who have great ideas but consider themselves to be too busy to master writing search optimized content. There are several main sites on the web where writers place bids on projects posted by people wanting articles, web content, search engine optimized material and ebooks. These are:

• www.guru.com
• www.elance.com
• www.freelancewriting.com
• 
  

These require a paid membership but it is worth it as it seems that most freelance writers on the web have conglomerated in either one or more of these places. You might also consider hiring writers from a local agency.

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SOURCE : TOP SEO-Secrets Part II : Creating Web Presence Using SEO